Computers are becoming music to the ears of disc jockeys

January 05, 2006|By Seth Hamblin, The Washington Post.

It's true that music-loaded laptops and MP3 players have become widespread objects of consumers' technolust. But in the world of club and mobile disc jockeys, where hulking turntables still hold an elite status, the mighty iPod is frowned upon as a tool of the trade and computers are just starting to make inroads.

Go out to a hip-hop club, and you might see a deejay cuing up a vinyl record that weighs as much as three iPod Nanos but holds only two songs. Ask the deejay for a song at a wedding reception and he'll likely have to flip through cases of CDs to find the track.

But here and there, deejays are beginning to turn to computers -- and to a much lesser extent, iPods -- to boot up the dance floor without having to carry hefty crates of records or CDs.

Back in the rave days of the 1990s, Atlanta's Preston Craig was criticized for deejaying on a PC, which many turntable artists considered cheating because it lacked the artistry of manipulating two slabs of wax to line up beats or cut back and forth between songs.

Now, between 300 to 500 people pack the room at his Friday-night party, dubbed Decatur Social Club. Never mind that he's using a laptop; the hipsters just want to hear the indie-pop, dance punk and retro stylings that Craig blends with a popular mixing program called Traktor.

"It's so much easier now to walk into a club and plug in a laptop," Craig said. "It wasn't acceptable before, but now the stigma is gone.... Now I hear deejays say that vinyl is overrated."

One major breakthrough for digital deejaying came in 1999, when a computer program called FinalScratch was introduced. Its interface allows deejays to use generic, digitally coded records on their turntables to control audio files on a computer. The audio on the records is a time code that the computer "hears" in order to know which millisecond of the song should be playing based on where the needle is on the record.

The system is so precise that deejays can "scratch" songs to get a "wicky-wicky" sound like on Herbie Hancock's 1983 hit "Rockit." FinalScratch was embraced by a number of deejay legends, such as Detroit's Carl Craig. A rival system called Serato Scratch Live is used by DJ Jazzy Jeff, who is best known for his work with rapper/actor Will Smith.

Dr. Drax, president of the Arizona-based American Disc Jockey Association and an authority on digital deejaying. said less than 10 percent of professional deejays are using computers, but he expects most DJs to switch over by the end of the decade as they discover their convenience.

Dr. Drax uses rack-mounted computers and a program called DJ Power to play music and videos at events and wedding receptions. The computer lets him quickly search his library of 100,000 songs. Rather than digging through piles of CDs, he can focus on keeping the party going. If someone wants to hear a Phil Collins track but can't remember the name, by the time he has typed in P-H-I, he has a list of all the artist's hits.

"A deejay doesn't just play music, he is an entertainer who threads it all together," said Dr. Drax.

As for iPods, Dr. Drax said they're not suited for professional deejaying.

"You could deejay with an iPod, but why would you want to?" he said. "That would be like you writing your story on a BlackBerry."

Built with the consumer in mind, iPods lack the sophisticated cuing, beat-matching and mixing functions that are standard on deejay gear. But their portability and tie-ins with online music stores have captured the imagination of many devotees who see the potential for the gadget to be a deejay tool.